The History of Friuli: Aquileia, Venzone, Polcenigo and Barcis

Hello, and welcome. Tonight, we are going to spend a long and quiet evening in the north-east of Italy, in a land called Friuli. It lies between the high mountains and the sea, at the very top of the Adriatic.

And we will visit four old places there. Aquileia, near the lagoon. Venzone, in a gap between the mountains. Polcenigo, at the springs of a river. And Barcis, a small village in the Val Cellina.

Our story tonight is a long one. It begins with people who lived in wooden houses at the edge of a marsh, many thousands of years ago. It passes through a Roman colony and a great river port, through bishops and patriarchs, walled towns and castles, mills and fairs and mountain roads. It passes through the long rule of Venice, and the coming of Napoleon. And it comes to an end near the close of the twentieth century, when a small old town in the mountains was built again, stone by stone.

There is nothing you need to remember, and nothing you need to do. You can let the story drift past, like the slow water of a spring under the trees. If you fall asleep before the end, that is perfectly all right. That is what this evening is for.

Friuli lies at the head of the Adriatic Sea. To the north and to the east rise the Carnic and the Julian Alps. To the south, a wide plain slopes gently down toward the lagoons and the sea. An old encyclopaedia of nineteen eleven described this plain as "richly watered by the Isonzo, the Tagliamento, and many lesser streams". In the dry season these streams run thin, but after rain, or when the snow melts, they come down in great floods.

The Tagliamento is the main river of Friuli. It comes down out of the mountains and spreads across the plain in a wide bed of pale gravel, divided into many channels. A handbook for travellers of eighteen sixty-six called its bed a real "Sea of Stones". The gravel is so loose that much of the water sinks into the ground, and rises again much lower down, in quiet springs.

Further west, at the foot of the mountains, another river is born all at once, from great springs of cold, clear water. This is the Livenza. It flows past the town of Sacile and on to the sea, and for a long time it marked the western edge of Friuli. And up in the mountains, the Cellina runs down its own long valley, the Val Cellina.

The name Friuli is very old. It comes from Forum Iulii, a Roman market town of the age of Julius Caesar or Augustus, which today is called Cividale. In time, the name of that one town spread over the whole land. The people here have a language of their own, Friulian. And the old arms of Friuli show a crowned eagle on a blue field.

Our four places are scattered across this land. Aquileia lies low on the plain, a few miles from the sea, at the edge of the lagoon. Venzone stands to the north, where the valley of the Tagliamento meets a narrow valley called the Canal del Ferro, on the old road to Carinthia. Polcenigo sits at the foot of the mountains, beside the springs of the Livenza. And Barcis lies in the heart of the Val Cellina, beside a lake of green water.

Tonight, we will meet many people along the way. Roman settlers who came to farm a frontier, and merchants who traded in wine, oil and amber. A bishop named Theodore, who left behind a great floor of mosaic. Patriarchs who ruled Friuli like princes, and the counts of a castle on a hill. Women of the mountain villages who walked down to the plain to sell wooden spoons. And millers and basket-makers, travellers and soldiers, and the people of a small walled town who would not let it disappear.

Some of the pictures you will see tonight are old photographs, from a great museum in Amsterdam. Many others are photographs I took myself, on many visits. They were taken in Barcis and the Val Cellina, at Polcenigo and the springs of the Livenza, and in Venzone, with a few in Aquileia.

So, make yourself comfortable. Let your shoulders soften, and let your breathing slow down. And let's begin, a very long time ago, in a quiet marsh at the foot of the mountains.

At the foot of the mountains, between the villages of Caneva and Polcenigo, there is a low, green basin. The springs of the Livenza feed it, and the water lies quiet among the reeds. It is called the Palu di Livenza. Palu simply means marsh.

Long ago, the basin was mostly marsh, with small ponds and little islands. Since then, part of it has been drained. But beneath the wet soil, something has been kept safe for a very long time.

Hunters had passed this way much earlier. But about six thousand years ago, roughly between four thousand five hundred and three thousand six hundred years before Christ, people came here to stay. They were farmers of the New Stone Age, the Neolithic. And they built a village at the edge of the water, on wooden piles.

Their houses were rectangular, and made entirely of wood. They stood raised above the damp ground, on hundreds of posts driven into the soft silt. Long beams of oak, three or four metres long, lay at the bottom as foundations, with square holes cut right through them at regular intervals, for the posts to pass. Some walls were partly plastered with clay, and inside there were hearths. Small pieces of that clay plaster still carry the marks of the upright timbers it was pressed against.

There was not just one village, but several, one after another, with short times in between when the place was left empty. As they built again, over the years, they turned their houses a little differently, to suit the ground, the sun, and the rising and falling of the water through the seasons. The very last building seems to have been a small storehouse, raised up on its posts.

If you could walk through that village on a summer evening, you might see smoke rising from the hearths. Around the marsh grew woods of mixed oak, where red deer, roe deer and wild boar lived. The people farmed and stored grain, and archaeologists have even found what seem to be dried wild apples, and small lumps of birch tar with the marks of human teeth, chewed, perhaps, like gum.

They left their tools behind as well. Flint scrapers and knives, and flint arrowheads. Bowls with square mouths, in a style of the time. Spindle-whorls, for spinning thread, and little clay stamps, perhaps for printing colours. And, because the wet ground has kept them, things of wood: part of an oar or paddle, a large vessel, a handle for an axe, a dipper still half carved, a digging stick, and a small wooden spoon.

An old book about Sacile, printed in eighteen sixty-eight, already says of Polcenigo that "traces of the Stone Age have recently been found in its soil." Careful digging began in the early nineteen-eighties, and again in two thousand and thirteen, but only a tiny part of the old village has been explored. In two thousand and eleven, the Palu di Livenza became part of a World Heritage Site of UNESCO, the Prehistoric Pile Dwellings around the Alps, which joins together more than a hundred such places in six countries. It is the only one in Friuli.

Much later, in the Bronze Age, from roughly eighteen hundred years before Christ, people out on the open plain of Friuli built a different kind of village. They raised great banks of earth around their homes, up to twenty metres wide at the base and four or five metres high. These villages are called castellieri. They stood some eight or ten kilometres apart, and between them rose burial mounds, as much as thirty-five metres across, raised over leading men who were later honoured as ancestors.

At Polcenigo, too, there was a settlement in the Bronze Age, at the foot of the hill of San Floriano. Out on the plain, many of the castellieri were left empty after the eighth century before Christ. But at the Palu, through all those long centuries, the springs went on rising, and the reeds went on growing over the hidden posts.

Now we travel east, across the plain, toward the sea. More than two thousand years ago, the land at the top of the Adriatic was a frontier. To the north rose the Alps. To the east lived the Istrians and the Illyrians.

The Roman historian Livy tells a curious story. In the year one hundred and eighty-six before Christ, a band of Gauls came over the mountains from the north, by a road no one had known. They did no harm. They simply found a stretch of empty land, not far from where Aquileia stands today, and began to build a town.

Rome sent envoys, and then soldiers. Three years later, the Gauls gave themselves up without a fight. There were some twelve thousand armed Gauls, by Livy's count. They explained that there were too many of them at home, and too little land, and so they had crossed the Alps to find a place to live. The senate replied that they had no right to build a town on land that was not theirs. But it ordered that their goods be given back, and they went home across the mountains.

The senate added a warning: "The Alps lay between as an almost impassable frontier line; those who were the first to make them easy of transit would certainly not be the better for it." And soon afterwards the senate decided to plant a colony of its own nearby, to watch over the frontier. They debated whether to send Roman citizens or Latin settlers. In the end, they chose Latin settlers.

And so, in the year one hundred and eighty-one before Christ, the colony of Aquileia was founded. Three men were sent to oversee the settlement: Publius Cornelius Scipio Nasica, Gaius Flaminius, and Lucius Manlius Acidinus. With them came about three thousand settlers who had been foot-soldiers, with centurions and horsemen, and their families.

Each foot-soldier was given fifty iugera of land, that is, about twelve or thirteen hectares. A centurion received a hundred iugera, and a horseman a hundred and forty. In the museum at Aquileia there is a stone that bears the name of Lucius Manlius Acidinus, and a marble relief that shows the ritual ploughing of the first furrow, as the Romans did when they founded a town.

A Greek geographer, Strabo, wrote that the town was founded as a fortress against the peoples who lived above it, to the north. The early years were not easy. The Istrians tried to stop the colony from being built at all.

Ten years after the founding, envoys from Aquileia came to Rome. Theirs was a new colony, they said, not yet well defended, lying between two hostile peoples, the Istrians and the Illyrians. Two years later, in one hundred and sixty-nine before Christ, fifteen hundred more families were sent to join them. A stone found in the forum remembers one of the men who led them, Titus Annius. It tells how he wrote the colony's laws, added members to its council, and built a temple.

The new town was laid out in a regular grid, with walls from the very beginning. Its shape bent with the river Natiso, which flowed along its eastern and southern sides. Merchant ships could sail up that river from the sea for some seven miles, right to the town.

And where did the name Aquileia come from? An old story, told by the emperor Julian in the fourth century, says that "at the time of the founding of the city an eagle from Zeus flew past on the right, and so bestowed on the place the omen derived from the bird." The Latin word for eagle is aquila, and so, the story goes, the town was called Aquileia, the city of the eagle.

Others thought it came from aqua, water. But no one is quite sure. The name may be older than the colony, the name of some earlier place or river. In Friulian today the town is called Aquilee, and in Slovene, Oglej.

In time, the frontier colony became something much larger. Aquileia grew into one of the great cities of the Roman world. No one knows exactly how many people lived there. Tens of thousands, and perhaps as many as a hundred thousand.

Its wealth came from the water. The town lay a few miles from the sea, at the edge of the lagoon, and the river beside it was wide enough for ships. Here the river opened out to almost fifty metres across. And along its right bank, for more than three hundred metres, ran the quays of the port.

The quays were rebuilt early in the first century after Christ. They were made of tall upright slabs of limestone, topped with squared blocks fitted tightly together, to form a broad loading floor. About two metres lower ran a second walkway, close to the water, where smaller boats could tie up. Three sloping ramps led up from the quays into the streets of the town.

Along those quays you can still see big blocks of stone jutting out at regular intervals, each with a hole cut straight down through it. They may have held mooring posts, or the feet of wooden cranes. And here and there, scratched into the stone of the walkways, are little game boards, where sailors and dockers passed the time. Behind the quays stood a single long brick building, more than three hundred metres long and no more than thirteen metres wide, probably a row of warehouses.

What came through this port? Strabo tells us that Aquileia was a market for the peoples who lived inland, toward the Danube. They loaded their wagons with "the products of the sea, and wine stored in wooden jars, and also olive-oil," and carried them inland. In return they brought cattle and hides.

Amber came down to Aquileia too, from the far shores of the north. The Roman writer Pliny says that amber was brought by the Germans into Pannonia, and that from there to the coasts where it was found was a journey of about six hundred miles. A guidebook of nineteen thirteen said simply that the city's chief products were amber and glass ware.

Roads ran out from the city in every direction. The Via Postumia, built in one hundred and forty-eight before Christ, ran west across the plain all the way to Genoa. To the north, a road climbed the valley of the Tagliamento and crossed the Alps toward Noricum. Others led east, toward Emona and Pannonia, and to Trieste and Istria. And in the second century before Christ, gold was found to the north, near where Klagenfurt stands today, and that, too, brought traders to Aquileia.

Emperors came here as well. Augustus stayed at Aquileia during his wars in Pannonia. And around ten years before Christ he received a visitor here, King Herod of Judea. Much later, in the fourth century, the city had an imperial palace, a mint where coins were struck, and a station for the fleet.

At the heart of the town lay the forum, an open square about a hundred and forty metres long and fifty-five metres wide, paved with limestone from the nearby Karst. Porticoes with shops ran along its sides, and above them were carved heads of Jupiter Ammon and of Medusa, one for the East and one for the West. Nearby runs a street named today after the woman who paid for its paving, Aratria Galla. Some of the forum's columns stand upright again today, raised once more in the nineteen-thirties.

Near the end of the fourth century, a poet from Gaul named Ausonius wrote a little poem about the famous cities of the world. He put Rome first, then Constantinople, Carthage, Antioch and Alexandria, then Trier, Milan and Capua. And ninth on his list came Aquileia, "colony of Italy, facing toward the mountains of Illyria and highly famed for walls and harbour."

Behind the quays and the busy forum, the people of Aquileia lived and worked. Many of the richer houses were built around gardens or paved courtyards, with porticoes, fountains and statues. Their walls were painted, or lined with panels of marble. And their floors were covered in mosaic.

Mosaics were laid in Aquileia for more than five centuries, from the late first century before Christ to the fifth century after Christ. In the houses between the forum and the river port, archaeologists have found a sea nymph, a Nereid, riding on a sea-bull. They have found curling tendrils of vine, and a kind of floor the Greeks called the unswept room. These floors followed Greek and eastern models, but they were made here, by skilled local craftsmen.

Let us look at one house. It was built early in the first century after Christ, between two streets. In the middle was a garden, with a mosaic path and a fountain. On one side, shops opened onto the street, and on the other side there was an atrium with four columns. A stone weight found there carries a name, Titus Macrus, probably the name of the man who owned the house.

Imagine a dinner in such a house. Banquets were held in the afternoon or the evening, in large decorated rooms, by the soft light of oil lamps of clay or bronze. In the kitchen there were pots and pans, plates, storage jars, chopping boards and knives, of clay, glass, stone and metal.

All around the city, people made things. Glassmakers gathered up broken glass and melted it down again. Over time they learned to blow their glass, freely or into moulds. Among the glass found at Aquileia are small bottles for ointments and perfumes.

Amber came from the far north, and Aquileia was one of the great places where it was carved and sold. People believed that amber could heal, and protect against the evil eye. Pliny tells us that peasant women beyond the river Po wore necklaces of amber, partly as an ornament and partly for its healing virtues. And he noticed something else: "owing to its transparency, certain objects are to be seen within, ants for example, gnats, and lizards."

Gem-cutters worked here too, often on stones brought by sea, carving tiny figures such as Eros and Psyche. Brick-makers stamped their names into their bricks, and one of them scratched a warning into the wet clay, about smoothing six hundred bricks, half a joke, perhaps, and half a threat. A smith's tombstone shows him at his anvil with hammer and tongs, while an assistant works the bellows. Beside them are the things he made: pincers, a hammer, a file, a lock.

Outside the walls, along the roads, lay the graves. A guidebook of nineteen thirteen describes the Roman tombs that "used to flank the roads outside the town-gates." There were simple gravestones and tablets, altars, coffins of stone and of lead, little tombs shaped like chapels, and urns with tall, pointed covers. Until the second century after Christ, most people were cremated, and their ashes were laid in urns of stone, glass, pottery, lead, or even alabaster.

One stretch of these graves can still be seen today. Five family plots, each enclosed by its own wall, stand beside a small road leading out of the town. They belonged to families called Statia, Iulia, Trebia and Cestia, and to one whose name is lost. They were used from the first century after Christ, and uncovered in nineteen forty and nineteen forty-one.

And in the museum there is the gravestone of a woman named Bassilla. She was a Greek actress of mime, who died while her company was on tour in Aquileia. The leader of her troupe wrote verses for her, in Greek. In a great port city, people came from many lands, and some of them, like Bassilla, stayed for ever.

For long years, Aquileia lived mostly in peace. Its old walls were hardly needed, and in many places, little by little, they crumbled and fell. Then, in the year two hundred and thirty-eight after Christ, the peace was broken.

That year, the senate in Rome turned against the emperor Maximinus, a soldier-emperor known as the Thracian, and chose other emperors in his place. Maximinus marched toward Italy with his army. The first city on his way, Emona, he found empty and abandoned. He crossed the Alps and came down into the plain. And there he heard that Aquileia, the largest city in that part of Italy, had closed its gates against him.

A Greek historian of the time tells us how the people prepared. They repaired the old wall, rebuilt the fallen sections, and added towers and battlements. Then they shut the gates, and stayed together on the wall, by day and by night. Two senators who had been consuls, Crispinus and Menophilus, took command. They had brought into the city supplies of every kind, and there was water enough from the many wells inside the walls, and from the river that flowed at their foot.

Maximinus sent envoys to the walls, among them an officer who had been born in Aquileia, to persuade the people to open the gates. The envoys shouted their message up from below, and the people on the walls listened quietly. But Crispinus, a dignified man and a fine speaker of Latin, went along the wall and urged them to stand firm. And they did.

The people of Aquileia had their own god, Belenus, an old Celtic god of healing, whom they likened to Apollo. Most of the stones that bear his name come from Aquileia, and a base dedicated to Apollo Belenus is kept in the museum. Through oracles and soothsayers, the god promised victory. Later, some soldiers said they had seen the city's god in the sky, fighting for its people. The Greek historian says honestly that he cannot tell whether it was true.

It was spring, and the mountain snows were melting. Sixteen miles from the city, Maximinus came to a great river, running wide and deep, and found its stone bridge broken. For two or three days his army waited on the bank. Then his engineers noticed many empty wooden wine casks, lying in the deserted fields. They fastened the casks together, laid planks across them, spread earth over the planks, and so made a floating bridge.

The country around Aquileia was lovely in that season. The historian describes trees planted in long, even rows, with vines strung from one to the next, so that the fields looked as if they were dressed for a festival.

The siege went on for many weeks. The whole population defended the walls, the historian says, women and children too. One ancient writer, not always reliable, tells a famous story. He says that, "lacking bow-strings with which to shoot their arrows, they made cords of the women's hair."

Outside the walls, it was the besiegers who began to go hungry. The senate had closed the roads and harbours of Italy, and no food reached the camp. So the army that was besieging the city was, in a way, besieged itself. In the end, one day at noon, during a pause in the fighting, the emperor was killed in his camp by his own soldiers.

What happened next is the gentlest part of the story. The people of Aquileia set up a market on top of their walls, and sold food and drink, clothes and shoes, to the hungry soldiers below. Soon afterwards the new emperor, Maximus, came from Ravenna, and the gates of Aquileia were opened to welcome him. In the museum today, an altar carved with figures of Rome and of Aquileia still recalls that long siege.

In the year three hundred and thirteen, an edict issued at Milan gave Christians the freedom to worship openly. At Aquileia, the bishop in those years was a man named Theodore. We know a little about him. In the year three hundred and fourteen, he and his deacon, Agathon, signed the acts of a council of bishops held at Arles. And he died around the year three hundred and nineteen.

Soon after three hundred and thirteen, Theodore built the first great church of Aquileia. It was really a group of buildings. There were two long halls, side by side, each about thirty-seven metres long and twenty metres wide, joined by a hall across, with a baptistery and the rooms of the bishop's house. They were built over older Roman buildings, probably warehouses of the river port.

The floor of the southern hall was covered entirely in mosaic. It measures about seven hundred and sixty square metres, the largest early Christian floor mosaic in the West. It was laid out in four great sections, one after another, from the entrance onward.

In the first section there are patterns of interlacing loops, with portraits and animals. Later, a small panel was added, of a cock fighting a tortoise. In the second section, there are portraits in round medallions, among them the Seasons. And there is the Good Shepherd, carrying a sheep across his shoulders, standing in a calm, classical pose. Around him, in small eight-sided panels, are fish, a stag, a gazelle, birds perched on branches, and storks.

In the third section, where the altar stood, there is a winged Victory, holding a wreath and a palm. And the fourth section is one great sea. It is full of fish, with octopuses and cuttlefish, dolphins and ducks. There are little winged figures fishing, as older guides describe them. And across the water runs the story of Jonah. He is thrown from a ship, swallowed by a great sea monster, cast out again, and at last he rests in the shade of a gourd vine.

In the middle of the sea there is a round medallion, with an inscription in Latin. It begins with the words Theodore felix, happy Theodore. In English, its words tell Theodore that, with the help of almighty God and the flock given to him from heaven, he has blessedly made all things and gloriously dedicated them. Because it speaks to Theodore, it was probably laid after his death.

The floor was walked on for only about eighty years. Then it was covered over by later buildings, and it lay hidden for about fifteen centuries, about a metre below the floor of the later church. Above it, generations of people came and went, and never knew what lay beneath their feet.

In eighteen ninety-four, an Italian magazine described the old basilica standing alone among vegetable gardens, with a floor chequered in white and red marble. Around those years, a small trial pit near the tomb of a patriarch revealed a fragment of mosaic: four large fish, swimming in a fishing net. For a long time it could be seen only through a trapdoor in the floor.

Then, in the summer of nineteen-oh-nine, the church was closed for repairs. At the end of July, workmen digging along the south wall, more than a metre down, came upon a layer of coloured mosaic. By early August it was clear that the old floor stretched across the whole church. A Friulian scholar, Pio Paschini, read the words of the inscription correctly, and the name of Theodore came back to light.

Imagine the workmen brushing away the earth, and the colours appearing one by one, the fish, the birds, the Good Shepherd. Over the following years, until nineteen fifteen, the whole great floor was uncovered, piece by piece, and Theodore's sea of fish lay open once again.

Aquileia had stood firm before. In the year four hundred and one, it held out against the Visigoths of Alaric. And its people still remembered, it seems, how their ancestors had once resisted Maximinus.

In the spring of four hundred and fifty-two, Attila, king of the Huns, crossed the Alps into Italy. The first city he attacked was Aquileia. A writer of the sixth century, Jordanes, describes it as the chief city of Venetia, standing on a point of land by the Adriatic, with the river, which he calls the Natissa, washing its walls on the eastern side. The siege, he says, was long and fierce, for brave soldiers defended the city from within.

And here we come to an old story, told by two writers of the sixth century. In Jordanes's version, Attila's army had grown weary and wanted to leave. Attila was walking around the walls, wondering whether to break camp, when he noticed something. The storks, Jordanes writes, "who build their nests in the gables of houses, were bearing their young from the city and, contrary to their custom, were carrying them out into the country." Attila told his soldiers that the birds foresee the future.

The other writer, the Greek historian Procopius, tells it a little differently. In his version, the siege had lasted so long that Attila had ordered his army to leave at sunrise. That morning, a single father stork, who had his nest on a tower of the city wall, rose up and flew away with his little ones. They were not yet quite ready to fly. So sometimes they flew beside him, and sometimes they rode upon his back.

Attila, in this story, took it as a sign, and told his army to stay where it was. And not long afterwards, the story says, that very part of the wall where the stork had built his nest fell down by itself. An English historian of the eighteenth century, Edward Gibbon, remarked that it is not easy to decide which of the two versions came first.

In the summer of four hundred and fifty-two, after a long siege, the city was taken and largely destroyed. Jordanes wrote that scarcely a trace of it was left, but that was not quite true. Aquileia lived on for more than a hundred years. The northern hall of Theodore's church, though, burned in those days, and it was never rebuilt.

Attila went on to other cities of the plain, and then to Milan and Pavia. At last, by the river Mincio, Pope Leo came out to meet him, and Attila turned back across the Alps.

Many people found shelter on the islands of the lagoon, where, in time, Grado and Venice would grow. It was a quiet world of shallow water and small islands. Gibbon, drawing on a letter written some seventy years later, said that the people of the lagoon lived like water-birds, with their nests fixed on the waves. "Fish was the common, and almost the universal, food of every rank: their only treasure consisted in the plenty of salt, which they extracted from the sea."

Other stories about Attila are still told in Friuli. In Udine, it is said that the hill where the castle stands was raised by his soldiers, so that he could watch Aquileia burning far away across the plain. The old guidebooks called this a tradition, and the hill, in truth, is far older than Attila.

And around Aquileia, there is the legend of the golden well. It is said that, as they fled, the citizens hid their treasure in a well, and that no one ever found it again. It is said, too, that until the First World War, when a field near Aquileia was sold, the deed sometimes carried a curious line: I sell you the field, but not the golden well.

Even in its hardest times, Aquileia remained the seat of a great church. An old tradition said that Saint Mark himself had preached there, and that Saint Hermagoras was its first bishop. Hermagoras and Fortunatus became the patron saints of the city.

The word patriarch comes from Greek, and means something like father and ruler. In the early centuries it was an honorary title, given to the bishops of the most important churches. The bishops of Aquileia began to use it in the sixth century, in a time of quarrels. In five hundred and fifty-three, a council at Constantinople condemned three writings, known as the Three Chapters. The bishops of northern Italy, led by the bishop of Aquileia, refused to accept this, and broke with Rome. It was during this long dispute that the bishop of Aquileia took the title of patriarch.

In five hundred and sixty-eight, the Lombards came down into Italy. The patriarch left Aquileia for the island of Grado, and carried with him all the treasure of his church. Grado lay close to the mainland, but out of reach of the Lombards, who had no boats. Paul the Deacon, a historian born at Cividale, adds a memory of that year: "In this year in the early winter as much snow fell in the plain as is wont to fall upon the summits of the Alps, and in the following summer there was such great fertility as no other age claims to remember."

Early in the seventh century, the church divided. One patriarch lived at Grado, under the protection of the Byzantine empire. Another was chosen in old Aquileia, under the Lombards. As Paul the Deacon puts it, "from that time there began to be two patriarchs."

The patriarchs of the mainland moved from place to place. In the eighth century they settled at Cividale. Later they returned to Aquileia, and in the thirteenth century they moved to Udine.

In the first half of the eleventh century there was a patriarch named Poppo, a friend of the emperor Conrad the Second. An earthquake had damaged the old church at Aquileia, and Poppo rebuilt it. On the thirteenth of July, ten thirty-one, the feast of Hermagoras and Fortunatus, the new basilica was consecrated and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. In the apse, a fresco still shows the consecration, in the presence of the emperor Conrad.

Beneath the altar lies a crypt, made in the ninth century to hold the relics of Hermagoras and Fortunatus. Its walls are covered with medieval frescoes telling the legend of Saint Mark. In the left aisle there is a small round chapel of marble, made in ten thirty-one as a copy of the Holy Sepulchre.

Beside the church, Poppo raised a great bell tower, about seventy-three metres high, built of stones taken from the old Roman amphitheatre. Its upper part was added in the fourteenth century.

The church changed again in later centuries. After the great earthquake of thirteen forty-eight, Patriarch Marquard rebuilt the nave in the Gothic style. Later still, Venetian carpenters made a wooden ceiling for it, shaped like the keel of a ship.

The patriarchs were not only churchmen. In ten seventy-seven, the king, and later emperor, Henry the Fourth, gave the patriarch Sigehard the rights of a duke over Friuli. This is traditionally the beginning of the Patriarchal State, which people called the Patria del Friuli. At its height, it also reached into Cadore, Trieste, and parts of Istria, Carniola and Carinthia. And it had a parliament, where nobles, clergy and towns sat together.

The patriarchs struck their own coins. A guidebook of nineteen thirteen tells of a museum in Udine that held a complete series of the coins of all the patriarchs of Aquileia. And the same guidebook describes a throne room in the archbishop's palace at Udine, with the portraits of all the patriarchs, one after another, looking quietly down from the walls.

We leave the lagoon now, and the old basilica of the patriarchs, with its tall bell tower rising over the fields. We travel north, across the wide plain of Friuli, toward the mountains. Slowly the land begins to rise. The fields give way to broad beds of pale stones, and then to wooded slopes. And at last we come to a place where the mountains close in, and the great river Tagliamento comes down out of the Alps.

Here, where two valleys meet, stands the little walled town of Venzone. One valley leads up the Tagliamento, toward the mountains of Carnia. The other, narrow and steep, follows the river Fella toward Pontebba and Tarvisio, and the lands of Carinthia beyond the Alps.

This second valley is called the Canal del Ferro, the Iron Valley. Its sides are steep and wooded, with rocks breaking through between the trees. Its name, found in documents from the thirteenth century, comes from the old trade in iron, which was carried down this way from the mines of Styria and Carinthia, toward the ports of the Adriatic.

People had travelled this way for a very long time. It was already a route in the days of the Celts. In Roman times a road called the Via Iulia Augusta ran up from Aquileia through these valleys, toward the province of Noricum, and traces of a small Roman post have been found near the place where Venzone's cathedral stands today.

An English handbook for travellers, printed in eighteen fifty-eight, follows the old road down from the north, through a narrow valley shut in by limestone mountains, past iron forges, to Pontebba, where a tower on a stone bridge marked the frontier. It puts it simply: Pontebba lies in a narrow pass, between high mountains, which may be said to form the gate of Italy.

In the year one thousand and one, the emperor Otto the Third gave the patriarch of Aquileia rights over the narrows of the valley, and over the grazing of the Canal del Ferro. So the patriarchs, whom we left beside their basilica near the sea, now watched over the gate to the north.

Merchants could not simply pass by. Venzone was a customs post, and every merchant was obliged to stop. A community of German speakers lived in the town, and in German it had a name of its own, Peuscheldorf. Goods came and went, and the little town grew.

Around the year twelve hundred, the patriarchs gave Venzone as a fief to a noble family, the lords of Mels. And in the thirteenth century, in work usually dated from twelve fifty-eight, Glizoio of Mels began to build its walls. There were two rings of them, of grey limestone, with a deep moat fed by the mountain stream, and about fifteen towers. All around the town, the walls ran for about thirteen hundred metres. Of the old gates, one still survives from the fourteenth century, the gate of San Genesio, a watchtower at a corner of the inner walls.

In the years that followed, Venzone changed hands several times. It passed to the counts of Gorizia, and in thirteen thirty-six the patriarch Bertrand took it back. Bertrand gave the town the right to collect the muta, the toll on goods, which until then had been taken at other places along the valleys. There was a weekly market, too, to which peasants came down from the valleys. In thirteen eighty-one Venzone became a free community, with a council of Forty and a seat in the Parliament of Friuli. And in fourteen twenty, like the rest of Friuli, it came under Venice.

Under Venice the town did well, and more than two thousand people lived there. But slowly the old road lost its importance, and by eighteen fifty-eight the English handbook found Venzone living from the rearing of silkworms. Then, in eighteen seventy-six, the railway came through the valley, and the little town's trade grew quieter still.

Inside the walls of Venzone stands a large church of stone, the cathedral of Saint Andrew. Saint Andrew the Apostle is the patron of the town, and his feast falls on the thirtieth of November, at the edge of winter.

A church stood on this spot long before the cathedral. Finds near its front suggest that a small church was already here in the sixth century. In the middle of the thirteenth century, Glizoio of Mels, the lord who built the walls, had the old church enlarged. Then, in the first years of the fourteenth century, it was rebuilt, to the design of a master builder from the nearby town of Gemona. He was Master Giovanni, who was called Griglio, and he also worked on the cathedral of Gemona. One of the doors of Venzone's cathedral, on the north side, bears the date thirteen-oh-eight.

In thirteen thirty-eight, the new church was consecrated by the patriarch Bertrand, the same patriarch who had taken the town back two years before. Bertrand was a reforming churchman, and after his death he was venerated as Blessed. A description of the church, written in fifteen sixty-eight, tells that it kept relics in vessels of gold and silver, gifts of the patriarchs, and above all of Bertrand, who seems to have held this town dear.

For a long time the church of Venzone was a daughter of the older church at Gemona. Only in thirteen ninety-one did the Pope make it a parish of its own. Even then, Venzone paid Gemona twenty-five ducats a year, and every year, at Pentecost, the people of Venzone walked in procession to Gemona.

The cathedral is built in a style between Romanesque and Gothic. Its plan is a Latin cross, with a single nave and a wide, bright transept. At the far end there are three apses, flanked by two towers. Outside, the apses have many sides, with buttresses at the corners, and on top of the buttresses stand small stone pyramids and statues. There are four bells, hung to swing in the Friulian way.

There are three doors. Over the north door, Christ gives his blessing. Over the south door, the Virgin is crowned. Over the main door, carved in the middle of the fourteenth century, is the Crucifixion. And on the north side, six round stone carvings in the Veneto-Byzantine style are set into the wall.

Inside there are frescoes. One shows the consecration of the cathedral itself. Another, painted around thirteen fifty by the school of Vitale da Bologna, shows Saint Martin and the beggar. Another shows Saint George and the dragon. There is a stone Pieta from the early fourteen hundreds, and a carved Lamentation of eight figures. And in seventeen ninety-two, the organ builder Gaetano Callido made an organ for the church.

Not far away, in the main square, stands the town hall. It is a Gothic building, built around fourteen hundred. On the ground floor there is an open loggia, and on its back wall are frescoes by the painter Pomponio Amalteo. A wide stair climbs on the outside to the upper floor, where the windows are shaped in graceful Gothic lobes. A small tower at the corner holds a clock, and the Lion of Saint Mark, the sign of Venice. And across the walls are the crests of the old families of Venzone.

If you climbed that outside stair, and stepped into the council hall, you would find a wooden Madonna of the fifteenth century. And on the wall, an older fresco, from the fourteenth century, of Saint Eligius, the patron of smiths and farriers, with two knights jousting beside him.

Both the cathedral and the town hall would one day have to be rebuilt, stone by stone, as we will hear much later. But for now, let us leave them standing quietly in the evening light, as they stood for many centuries, with the mountains all around.

Venzone has one more story to tell, and it is a curious one. We will tell it quietly, and gently.

In sixteen forty-seven, some work was being done in the cathedral, to make room for a new chapel, the Chapel of the Rosary. An old tomb of the fourteenth century was opened, a tomb bearing the arms of the Scaligeri of Verona. Inside lay the body of a man. But he had not turned to dust. His body had dried, and become very light, almost like parchment.

An American magazine of nineteen-oh-six, translating a French account, described him. He was a man of average height, and he weighed only fifteen kilograms, although in life he seems to have been quite stout. People came to call him il Gobbo, the Hunchback. He had died, it seems, around the middle of the fourteenth century.

That was only the beginning. Over the centuries, more of these dried bodies were found in the tombs beneath the cathedral floor, about forty in all. But not every tomb did this. The same account of nineteen-oh-six says that only eleven tombs, all close to the high altar, had this curious power. They looked quite ordinary. They were small chambers of masonry, closed with slabs of stone.

The bodies dried in a little more than a year. The skin turned a yellowish brown, like tanned leather. The writer of nineteen-oh-six put it this way: They are extremely light, and sound when struck like a mass of parchment.

Why this happened, no one is quite sure. People once believed that a fine mould grew in the tombs, a mould so eager for moisture that it dried the bodies before they could decay. A book printed in Milan in eighteen thirty-one even had a drawing of it. The account of nineteen-oh-six adds that a body laid in a sealed zinc coffin did not become a mummy at all.

Local writers also spoke of a mineral in the soil, calcium sulphate. Then, in nineteen eighty-three, an American scientist, Arthur Aufderheide, searched for the mould, and could not find it. He thought that the dry limestone ground, and the shelter of the church above, were more likely reasons. And so the question remains open.

In front of the cathedral stands a small round chapel, the chapel of San Michele, built in the thirteenth century, with a crypt below. For a long time the mummies were kept in that crypt. In the eighteen-forties they were moved up into the chapel above, and it came to be known as the Museum of the Mummies. Visitors had been shown the bodies since the seventeen hundreds. The English handbook of eighteen fifty-eight mentions them in a single line: The dead bodies in the church here are preserved naturally in the condition of mummies. Local tradition even says that Napoleon came to see them.

In nineteen fifty, an American photographer came to Venzone, and the mummies appeared in a picture story in a well-known magazine. Scholars, too, came to study them over the years, and wrote books and papers about them.

The last burial in the cathedral tombs took place in eighteen eighty-one. As the writer of nineteen-oh-six noted, the law of Italy no longer allowed burials inside churches. And so the mummies of Venzone could no longer grow in number, and the strange gift of the tombs would become only a memory.

Today, five of them rest in the crypt of San Michele, in the half-light beneath the round chapel. They lie there very still, light as dry leaves, keeping their old secret. Outside, the bells of the cathedral ring the hours over the square, and the mountains stand around the little town, as they always have.

From Venzone, let us travel back across the plain of Friuli, past the wide stony bed of the Tagliamento, and on toward the west, to where the plain meets the mountains again, at the foot of Monte Cavallo. Here lies Polcenigo.

The old village sits in a narrow valley, along a small, quick stream called the Gorgazzo. Some of its houses were once mills and forges, built over the water. And to the north of the village rises a hill. On top of it stood the castle of Polcenigo.

An old book about Sacile and its district was printed in eighteen sixty-eight. It describes the place like this: On a hill that rises almost in the middle of a small plain, closed in by the mountain, the Gorgazzo and the hills, a few ruins still recall the old castle.

In old times, Polcenigo was also called Paucenigo, or Pulcenico. The castle is first named in the year nine hundred and sixty-three, in a grant made by the emperor Otto the First to the bishop of Belluno. By the eleventh and twelfth centuries it belonged to a family of lords who took their name from it, the lords of Polcenigo, who later became counts. They were an old noble family of the Patriarchal State, with a seat in its Parliament. Family tradition even claimed that their ancestors had come from France, long ago.

The medieval castle had a strong tower, the keep, and two rings of walls with battlements. The village grew along the south-eastern ring, and early in the thirteenth century the castle was enlarged to take it in. The lords of Polcenigo also held Fanna, in the hills to the east, with another castle above it, called Mizza.

Small glimpses of their life come down to us in old papers. In twelve nineteen, a deed was drawn up in the portico of the castle church, the church of San Pietro. And in twelve ninety-five, a lady of the family, Hengerada, the wife of Gerardo of Polcenigo, left money in her will to repair a chalice of that church.

The centuries passed. Early in the seventeenth century, two counts of Polcenigo, the brothers Giovanni Battista and Marzio, were captured by the Turks, and part of the castle was sold to pay their ransom. Their heavy iron fetters were hung, as a thank-offering, in a church by the springs of the Livenza, which we will visit soon. In that same century the old castle was destroyed by fire, and by the early seventeen hundreds it was in poor condition.

So the counts decided to build anew. In the middle of the eighteenth century, on the summit of the hill, they raised a great palace in the Venetian style, attributed to the Venetian architect Matteo Lucchesi. The book of eighteen sixty-eight says: Count Ottavio built on its summit a sumptuous palace, an admirable work by Matteo Lucchesi.

It was built with stones from the old castle, and with large blocks from a quarry nearby. It looked like the palaces along the Grand Canal in Venice. It had three floors and eighteen rooms, with frescoes and stucco, tapestries and mirrors, and a row of tall arched windows looking down over the village.

From the village, a grand stairway climbed the hill to the ballroom. It was more than ten metres wide, with a loggia at the side where one could stop and rest. It had about three hundred and sixty-five steps, one for each day of the year, it is said. Imagine a summer evening long ago, with light in the tall windows, and guests climbing slowly up the long stair, step after step, toward the ballroom.

The counts lived there for about a century. Then, in the nineteenth century, the family left it. Later owners carried away everything that could be moved, even the tiles of the roof. Today the palace belongs to the town. It stands on its hill without a roof, its empty windows open to the sky, looking down over the village and the stream.

Close to Polcenigo, at the foot of the mountains, water rises out of the ground. There are three great springs here, and together they give birth to the river Livenza. They are the Gorgazzo, the Santissima, and a third spring, the Molinetto, near Caneva.

Where does all this water come from? Above the springs rise the mountains of the Cansiglio and Monte Cavallo, made of limestone. Rain and snow fall there, and sink away through cracks and hollows in the rock. The water travels in the dark, through the mountain, and comes up again at its foot.

The Gorgazzo lies about a kilometre from the village, hidden among trees and rocks. It looks like a small, deep pool, at the foot of a grey wall of rock. The local people call it el buso, the hole. Its water is icy, even in summer, and it has wonderful colours: emerald, turquoise, and, where it is deepest, an intense blue. The banks are tinged red by the limestone, and green by the algae.

In eighteen seventy-seven a geographer from Friuli, Giovanni Marinelli, came to see it, and searched for words. Take the colour of emerald, he wrote, the colour of turquoise, the colour of beryl; throw them into a bath of lapis lazuli, and you will have the tint of that piece of liquid sky that is called the Gorgazzo. A few years earlier, in eighteen seventy-two, the painter Luigi Nono had painted the spring, and he came back to paint it several times.

No one knows how deep the Gorgazzo goes. Divers have gone down more than two hundred metres, and still no one has found the bottom. Much closer to the surface, about nine metres down, stands a statue of Christ, and on bright days it can be seen from above.

From the spring, the Gorgazzo stream winds down to the village in small waterfalls, past old houses of stone and wood. Along it the counts of Polcenigo built their mills. The old book about Sacile, printed in eighteen sixty-eight, says: Along the Gorgazzo they built several corn-mills, a water-powered saw and an iron-hammer forge. Later there was a silk mill too, and the counts were said to be the first in Friuli to plant mulberry trees.

At the Santissima, the Livenza itself is born. Here many small springs rise so close together that they seem to form one great mouth of water. There is a constant sound of rushing and bubbling, which slowly quietens into a wide, calm pool. Within a few dozen metres the river is already formed, and deep enough for boats.

Beside the springs stands the sanctuary of the Holy Trinity, the Santissima Trinita. According to a local legend, the Holy Trinity once appeared here, long ago, in the days of a Roman emperor. The church is first recorded in the fourteenth century, and by the fourteen hundreds people came here on pilgrimage, to pray for children, and for rain in times of drought. In the sixteenth century, Franciscan friars came from Venice to care for the sanctuary. Inside is a carved and painted wooden altarpiece of the Holy Trinity, made in fourteen ninety-four by Domenico da Tolmezzo, and a statue called the Madonna del Latte, to which mothers came when they could not nurse their babies. And here hang the iron fetters of the counts of Polcenigo.

The valley of the Santissima was once a marsh, close to the place where, as we heard much earlier, people lived in a village in the marsh some six thousand years ago. In the nineteenth century the marsh was drained, and turned into fields.

From here the Livenza flows away through the plain, past Sacile, where it wraps the town in several branches, and on to the Adriatic, near Caorle. A Venetian diarist, Marin Sanudo, who visited Sacile in fourteen eighty-three, noted simply that the Livenza came from Polcenigo, that boats could travel on it, and that it ended in the sea.

Let us go back now to the early years of the fourteen hundreds, when a great change was coming to all of Friuli. For more than three centuries, the patriarchs of Aquileia had ruled Friuli as princes. In fourteen eighteen, an army of the emperor entered Friuli, supported by the patriarch, Ludwig von Teck, and by the counts of Gorizia. On the other side stood Venice, helped by a great Friulian family, the Savorgnan.

The war went well for Venice. Sacile fell. Cividale gave itself up of its own accord. Udine was besieged, and fell, and after Udine came Aquileia, and all the strongholds of Friuli. A historian of Venice, writing in eighteen ninety-three, put it in one line: The year fourteen twenty saw the Republic mistress of the whole province from the sea to the Alps. The patriarch formally gave up his lordship.

An encyclopaedia of nineteen eleven tells the story with a little smile. The nobles of Friuli, it says, had called on Venice for help, and Venice, once it had won, kept the country for itself, a new illustration of one of Aesop's fables.

In the summer of fourteen twenty, the first Venetian Lieutenant of Friuli, Roberto Morosini, took up his office at Udine. From then on, a Lieutenant sent from Venice lived in Udine, at first for one year, and later for sixteen months. Udine remained the capital of the Patria del Friuli, as the land was called. In its main square a new town hall rose, in the Venetian Gothic style, between fourteen forty-eight and fourteen fifty-seven, and opposite it stands a clock tower that recalls the one in the square of Saint Mark in Venice.

Venice did not sweep the old world away. It left much as it was. The old Parliament of Friuli went on meeting. The castle lords kept their castles, and the towns kept their own statutes. Later, from fifteen eighteen, the villages had an assembly of their own, called the Contadinanza.

At Polcenigo, the counts stayed on as lords, now under the Republic. Even before the war, in fourteen ten, they had promised Venice to keep sixteen horses for the defence of the land between the Tagliamento and the Livenza, and Venice paid them twenty ducats a year for each horse. Up in the mountains, Venzone became Venetian too.

The patriarchs did not give up at once. At a great council of the Church at Basel, the patriarch accused Venice of holding Friuli unlawfully. But in fourteen thirty-seven, at Prague, Venice received from the emperor a formal grant of its lands on the mainland. And in fourteen forty-five, the patriarch gave up his lands for good, in exchange for a yearly payment of five thousand ducats.

From the early fourteen-seventies to fourteen ninety-nine, harder years came, as Ottoman horsemen from Bosnia made several raids into Friuli, riding fast across the plain and keeping away from the walled towns. It was said that their fires could be seen far away, from the bell tower of Saint Mark's in Venice. Venice built forts along the river Isonzo and set up signals to warn the villages, and in fourteen seventy-nine it made peace with the Sultan, though one last raid came in fourteen ninety-nine, as far as the Livenza.

In time, the land grew quiet again. Fields were sown and harvested, and the bells rang in the villages. For Polcenigo, three centuries of peace followed, and in the seventeen hundreds, years of prosperity.

So Friuli became one of the mainland provinces of Venice. Its people still spoke their own Friulian speech, and kept their own ways, in the villages of the plain and in the valleys of the mountains. But now, when news or orders came, they came from the city on the lagoon.

Let us return now to the lagoon, to Aquileia, and see what became of the old city of the patriarchs. When Venice took Friuli in fourteen twenty, Aquileia passed to Venice with the rest. The patriarchs lost their power as princes, but the old city still gave its name to their great church, the Patriarchate of Aquileia.

Aquileia lay near the eastern edge of Friuli, close to the lands of the counts of Gorizia, which in fifteen hundred passed to another power, the house of Austria. In the early sixteenth century, in the wars that began in fifteen-oh-nine, Aquileia passed to the Habsburgs. And there it stayed, on the Austrian side of the border, until the First World War. Across the fields, most of Friuli belonged to Venice. So the old city of emperors and patriarchs became a quiet border village.

For centuries, its ancient buildings had served as quarries, and many of its stones had gone to build Grado and the growing city of Venice. And the land around it had changed. Its rivers and canals had turned swampy, and with the marshes came the fever. A guidebook of nineteen thirteen put it simply: The district, for centuries rendered uninhabitable by the malaria rising from the swampy rivers and canals, has been partly drained and re-settled since the reign of Maria Theresa. An English handbook of eighteen ninety-seven warned that, at certain seasons, the air was unhealthy, because of the marshes all around.

The great basilica still stood. In the Venetian years, around fifteen hundred, new parts in the style of the Renaissance were added to the choir. But of the palace of the patriarchs, which had once had a great courtyard and arcaded loggias, only two lonely columns remained. Beside the basilica, the old baptistery slowly fell into ruin, and it is said that its decay began only in seventeen ninety, when its iron tie-bars were taken away.

Meanwhile, the patriarchs themselves had become Venetian noblemen. From fourteen sixty-five to the very end, the last twenty patriarchs all came from noble families of Venice, and the last three were all of one family, the Dolfin. But their church still reached across the border into Austrian lands, and in Vienna this was not welcome. In seventeen nineteen, an edict issued at Graz forbade Austrian subjects to accept a patriarch chosen without the emperor's consent.

At last, in seventeen fifty-one, Venice and the Empress Maria Theresa came to an agreement, and the Pope, Benedict the Fourteenth, brought the old Patriarchate of Aquileia to an end. In its place he created two archbishoprics: Udine, for the Venetian side, and Gorizia, for the Austrian side. The last patriarch kept his title for the rest of his life. A medal was struck in that year, and its Latin words say that by this change, peace was restored to the subjects. So, after many centuries, there were no more patriarchs of Aquileia.

And the village? An English writer named Jackson came here in the eighteen-eighties. As he drove toward Aquileia, he saw Roman amphorae set on garden walls as decorations, and crowning the gables of farmhouses. When he reached the village, he found it hard to believe that he stood in the heart of one of the greatest cities of Rome. There was, he wrote, a village green with half-a-dozen houses around it. The village street was hardly more than a country lane.

And yet, every year, the plough turned up coins and gems, buckles and clasps, from the old city beneath the fields. Sellers even offered false antiquities to visitors. Beside two quiet mill-streams, one could still trace the square outline of the first Roman camp.

Imagine walking there on a still summer evening, along that country lane, with the tall bell tower above you and the reeds stirring in the ditches. In its small village, among the fields and the marshes, Aquileia slept, with its treasures under the earth.

Let us go back to Polcenigo, at the foot of the mountains, and stay a while in the village itself. Every year, early in September, Polcenigo holds a fair called the Sagra dei Sest, the festival of baskets. In the local Friulian speech, a sest is a basket. It is said that the fair has been held for more than three hundred years.

It began not in the village but at the Santissima, by the springs of the Livenza. There, at the sanctuary, farmers came to buy simple containers of wicker and reed, ready for the grape harvest, which began in September or October. The baskets were made from what grew close by. The marsh near the springs, before it was drained in the nineteenth century, was full of small, pliant twigs and withies, and for centuries it supplied the basket-makers. In nineteen twenty-two, a local writer noted that the quiet church at the springs came alive each September, on the feast of the Madonna, with crowds who came down from the mountains and in from the villages nearby.

Later the fair moved to the centre of Polcenigo, and now thousands of people come. Imagine the old lanes on an early September morning, lined with stalls. There are baskets and objects of wicker, reed, raffia and wood, and also pottery, leather, copper and wrought iron. There are fruit and honey, cured meats and cheeses. Craftsmen show how the old work was done, and the village even has a school of weaving, with courses for young and old.

The old village has buildings from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, with courtyards and gardens. Halfway between the village and the castle stands San Giacomo, once a convent of Franciscan friars. It is first mentioned in twelve sixty-two, and it is the oldest convent in the diocese of Concordia. The same lady Hengerada whom we met at the castle remembered the friars too. The old book about Sacile, printed in eighteen sixty-eight, says: In the days of Saint Francis, it seems, the convent of the friars was founded in this place, for it is remembered that in twelve ninety-five Lady Hengerada left a hundred lire to repair the convent and the church.

The church was rebuilt after a fire in fourteen eighty-two, and enlarged in the sixteen hundreds by the counts of Polcenigo. In seventeen sixty-nine, Venice closed the convent, and the next year San Giacomo became the parish church. Inside are an altarpiece by Egidio Dall'Oglio, a wooden choir, painted coffered ceilings, and a chapter hall with wooden panels from the fourteen hundreds.

At the old entrance to the village stands San Rocco, an old little church, dedicated to the saint who protected people from the plague. It has a low, square bell tower, which may once have been a watchtower. Beside the door, a little hand carved in stone invites passers-by to leave a coin. Inside, under bare wooden beams, are faded frescoes painted in sixteen thirty-eight, a year of plague.

The village has its palaces, too. Palazzo Fullini-Zaia, on the square, is a noble palace of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, with rusticated arches and carved masks. Palazzo Manin-Zaro, in the late Venetian style, has a long front of beige and green, with a three-light window at its centre. The Manin family had bought a share of Polcenigo in sixteen-oh-eight, when money was needed for the ransom of the captured counts, and they owned this palace for two centuries.

Palazzo Scolari-Salice has a terraced garden in the Italian style. It was laid out by an engineer, Pietro Quaglia, after his young wife died in eighteen sixty-one. Its paths lead to a little grotto, with water.

At Christmas, nativity scenes are set up in the lanes of the old village, and in autumn, up in the hamlet of Mezzomonte, there is a festival of chestnuts. And so the year turns in Polcenigo, from baskets to chestnuts to Christmas.

Now we leave the springs and the soft hills of Polcenigo, and go up into the mountains, into the valley of the Cellina. The Cellina is a mountain torrent, which rises in the mountains near Claut. For a long time this valley was hard to reach from the plain, and how the road finally came, we will hear later.

At the mouth of the valley, on a green terrace, lies the village of Andreis, sheltered by the mountains, Monte Raut, Resettum and Fara. Andreis is first recorded in the year nine hundred and ninety-six, in a document of the emperor Otto the Third, and it became a parish of its own in sixteen fifty-one. In its own speech, it is called Andrees, for the people of the valley speak Friulian, as well as Italian.

There is an old legend that Attila passed Andreis by, because a fog had hidden the village from his sight. It is only a legend, but it is a gentle one.

The houses of Andreis are of stone, with outside galleries made entirely of wood, called daltz, with dark wooden platforms, and ladders on the outside. The whole village is like a museum of the old mountain life, still lived in.

And there is a real museum, too. Since nineteen eighty-one, the old town hall has housed a museum of rural life. Here are wooden Easter rattles, called craceles, which took the place of the church bells on Maundy Thursday. Here are wooden clogs, called palotes, some with spikes for walking on ice, and shoes of black velvet, for feast days. There are wicker baskets, tools for wool and for milk, and the tools of the blacksmith and the woodcutter. Andreis has its own foods too: a salted cheese, good with potatoes, and a salami flavoured with cumin, called peta.

Further up the valley lies Barcis. It sits in a wide basin between wooded Monte Longa and sunny Monte Lupo, within the natural park of the Friulian Dolomites. It is a very small village, of only a couple of hundred people.

Barcis is old. Its mother church is already named in a papal document of the late twelfth century, and in those days the name Barcis meant the whole lower Val Cellina. In thirteen twenty-seven, the village was granted a free market on Saint Daniel's day.

The parish church of San Giovanni Battista dates from the late fifteen hundreds, and was remodelled later. Inside are a marble altar and a fresco of Salome's banquet.

The finest old building of the valley is Palazzo Centi, built some four hundred years ago. It is made of rough local stone, with a double loggia: low, wide arches below, and round arches above. It joins the plain mountain style of the Val Cellina with the elegance of Venice. It was once a hotel and restaurant, and today it holds the library and the tourist office. It has come through fires, war and earthquakes.

The houses of Barcis are of two kinds: some with wooden galleries, and others closed and solid, like blocks. The village burned in sixteen-oh-six, and during the war, in nineteen forty-four, much of it was burned again.

Around Barcis, meadows were once mown for hay, among the beech woods, and an old stone bridge still crosses the narrow gorge of the Caltea. In Venetian times, timber from the upper valley was floated down the Cellina, with the help of small dams of logs called stue. And in the hills above Polcenigo, people once used sleds to bring logs and hay down the mountain, and every August a race of hay sleds still remembers them.

Among the foods of the valley are white polenta and game, a sausage of sheep's meat called petuccia, and dried chamois meat called brusaula. In summer, Barcis keeps its feasts: Saint John's Night, on the twenty-third of June, and a festival of the emigrant and the summer visitor. And on those long evenings, when the light lingers on the mountains, the valley seems very far from the plain below.

Further up the Val Cellina, beyond Barcis, the valley climbs toward the villages of Claut, Cimolais and Erto. Up there the valley was isolated, and there was little good land. And so, for a long time, the people of the upper valley had to look for part of their living somewhere else.

Some of the travellers from these villages were women. They were called the sedonere. They walked down out of the mountains to the plain, and on to the towns of northern Italy, to sell things made of wood: spoons and ladles, and all kinds of simple tools for the kitchen.

Their name came from the sedon, the wooden spoon. A Friulian dictionary printed in eighteen seventy-one lists the word sedon, spoon, among everyday words it calls Friulian peculiarities, often impossible to translate.

The spoons were made by local craftsmen, and the women carried them away to sell. Some pushed carts with iron wheels along the roads. Others carried heavy wooden chests on their backs, full of spoons and ladles.

They were away for weeks, and sometimes for months. They walked in sun and in bad weather. At night they slept in haylofts or in stables, or in the house of a family who gave them a bed. It is said that the spoon sellers had a secret jargon of their own, called dherbol, which a linguist named Ugo Pellis studied in the nineteen-thirties.

This trade lasted from the late nineteenth century until the nineteen-fifties. It grew after the First World War, and then, slowly, it faded away, as new roads, new transport and new shops came.

The money the women brought home kept their families going. And for many of them, it was something more. It was a first taste of independence: handling money, choosing their own roads, and making their own decisions, far from home. In Claut today, a small museum, the Museo della Casa Clautana, tells the story of the women of the valley, and of the sedonera's path, which in Friulian is called fora pal mont, out into the world. In recent years, a film recorded the memories of some of the last sedonere, women of more than ninety years.

The women of the Val Cellina were not the only ones who went out into the world. From the mountains of Friuli, people had travelled for work for a very long time. A book about Italian emigration, printed in nineteen nineteen, put it simply: "Farther to the north, in Friuli, has been the greatest source of Italian temporary emigration." For many years, it said, a quarter of all the Italians who went to work in other European countries came from this region.

Many of them were skilled men: masons and stone-cutters, blacksmiths and carpenters, and workers at the furnaces. The same book described how a boy's working life might begin. He would start at the brick furnaces, in Hungary perhaps, or in Germany. Then he would carry bricks and mortar for the masons, and in time become a mason himself, working in cement and fine stucco. In winter he came home, and some went to schools where the finer points of the mason's art were taught.

Italian workers in stucco and cement brought terrazzo floors to Silesia and Saxony, to Berlin and to Kiel, and most came home at the end of each season. In the foothill villages around Sequals and Spilimbergo, people had worked in terrazzo and mosaic for centuries, and had carried their craft far abroad. In January nineteen twenty-two, a school for mosaic workers opened at Spilimbergo, with thirty-eight students.

Down at the foot of the mountains, an old book about Sacile, printed in eighteen sixty-eight, counted about two thousand people a year leaving Polcenigo and Budoia. It says: "the women go chiefly to Venice as maidservants, wet-nurses or water-carriers; the men choose the trades of mason, stone-cutter, labourer, porter or plank-sawyer." And then, as the seasons turned, many of the travellers came home again, to their villages, and to the people who had waited for them.

For almost four hundred years, most of Friuli belonged to the Republic of Venice. Its Lieutenant lived at Udine, and the old towns and castles of the Patria kept their councils and their customs. But at the end of the eighteenth century, a great storm blew across Europe, and Venice could not stand against it.

In seventeen ninety-six, a French general, Napoleon Bonaparte, arrived in Italy. In front of him were the armies of Austria. Venice wished to stay neutral, but it had no defences strong enough to keep the war away. Its lands became a battlefield for both armies.

In the spring of seventeen ninety-seven, the French crossed Friuli, and the wide stony bed of the Tagliamento did not hold them back. They pushed on toward Austria, and in April, near Leoben in Styria, the first terms of a peace were signed.

Venice itself had no strength left to fight. On the twelfth of May, seventeen ninety-seven, the Great Council of the Republic voted to accept a new form of government, and the old Republic came to an end, after more than a thousand years. The last doge was Lodovico Manin. A historian of Venice, writing in eighteen ninety-three, tells that as the doge laid aside his ducal cap, he said to his servant, with only half a regret: "Take it away; we shall not use it any more."

That autumn, Bonaparte made his headquarters in Friuli, at the Villa Manin, at Passariano, near Codroipo. It was the great country house of the Manin family, the family of the last doge. The Austrian envoys stayed at Udine. And between the two, through September and into October, the talks went slowly on.

Bonaparte's secretary, Bourrienne, was with him at Passariano, and years later he wrote down what he remembered. "On the thirteenth of October, at daybreak, on opening my window, I perceived the mountains covered with snow." He went to wake the general, and told him. Bonaparte leaped from his bed and ran to the window. Winter was coming early, he said, and so they must make peace.

The Austrian envoy, Count Cobenzl, fought hard for better terms. There is a famous story, probably exaggerated, that in one stormy meeting Bonaparte smashed a precious piece of porcelain. A later historian thought that he had only knocked over a cabinet with a costly vase, with his sweeping gestures. And Bourrienne himself wrote that he knew nothing of any such scene.

The treaty was signed on the seventeenth of October, seventeen ninety-seven. It bears the name of Campo Formio, a village between the two camps. But it was signed, as the Villa Manin tells, in the great villa at Passariano, where the room of the treaty can still be visited today.

By this peace, Austria received the city of Venice and its lagoons, and the Venetian mainland, with Friuli, as well as Istria and Dalmatia. France took the Ionian Islands, and Belgium. The very first article promised a solid and unchanging peace, for ever. And the Emperor of Austria gave Bonaparte a present of six magnificent white horses.

In the years that followed, Friuli changed hands more than once. At first it was Austrian. From eighteen-oh-five it became part of Napoleon's Kingdom of Italy, as the department of Passariano, and General Duroc, the grand marshal of Napoleon's palace, bore the title of Duke of Friuli. In eighteen fifteen, the whole country returned to Austria.

Little Polcenigo saw soldiers come and go, first the French, and then the Austrians. In the spring of eighteen-oh-nine, Eugene de Beauharnais, who ruled Italy for Napoleon as his Viceroy, met his generals in a palace in the village, to plan a battle near Sacile against the Archduke John of Austria. The battle was won by the Archduke. And after the wars there came hard years, with poor harvests and heavy taxes.

Life went on, as it always does. The mills turned on the Gorgazzo, and the bells rang over the fields. And in the main square of Udine, a seated figure of Peace was set up, in memory of the treaty of seventeen ninety-seven.

Aquileia, as we have heard, had passed to the Habsburgs in the early sixteenth century, while most of Friuli stayed with Venice. Now, after the wars of Napoleon, all of Friuli was Austrian. And in eighteen sixty-one, to the west, a new Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed.

In eighteen sixty-six there was war once more, between Austria and Italy. That summer, an armistice signed at Cormons fixed a new line, along the old boundary of the Kingdom of Lombardy and Venetia. And in the autumn, by the peace with Austria, Venetia, and with it western Friuli, became part of Italy. In October the people voted, and they chose to join the new kingdom.

So a border ran through Friuli. In the north it followed the high ridge of the Carnic Alps. In the plain it followed two small streams, the Judrio and the Ausa, down to the sea, just west of Grado. Udine and Pordenone, Polcenigo, Venzone and the Val Cellina were now in Italy. But Aquileia stayed in Austria, together with Grado, Gorizia, Gradisca and Cervignano.

Travellers coming from Italy by train crossed the border at Cervignano. A guidebook of nineteen thirteen put it simply: "Cervignano, the seat of the Austrian custom-house, with terracotta works and weaving-mills, is the first village in the Austrian littoral." Another guidebook of the same years, written for travellers coming the other way, from Trieste, called the very same station the seat of the Italian custom-house. It all depended on the direction of the journey.

From Cervignano a little branch railway ran down through the fields, to Aquileia, and on to the edge of the lagoon, where a steamboat waited to carry travellers to Grado. Near the line lay the village of Monastero, with the model farm and the vineyards of a baron, von Ritter-Zahony. And out on the little islands of the lagoon stood the fishermen's huts called casoni, built of reeds, which looked, the guidebook said, like something from prehistoric times.

Aquileia itself was a poor and quiet place. It had three hotels, the Hotel de la Poste, with a small garden, the Citta di Grado, and the Aquila Nera, and the guidebook noted that they were quite Italian. The old basilica had been restored in the Austrian years, in eighteen forty-five and eighteen forty-six.

Under Austria, too, the search for the Roman city went on. From eighteen fifteen, Gerolamo de Moschettini directed excavations. A first museum, opened in eighteen-oh-seven, had been named after Eugene de Beauharnais, whom we met at Polcenigo. And in eighteen seventy-three, the town opened a museum of its own.

Then, on the third of August, eighteen eighty-two, the Austrian State Museum opened, founded by the Emperor Franz Joseph, in a villa that had belonged to the Cassis Faraone family. Its first director was Enrico Maionica, an archaeologist from Trieste, who later published a map of the finds. Visitors rang a bell to be let in. The guidebook of nineteen thirteen called the museum garden charming, with ancient sculptures and urns "effectively interspersed among the cedars, cypresses, and palms". Inside there were more than two thousand inscriptions, Roman tombs that had once lined the roads outside the town gates, and a Roman sundial with a little wind-indicator.

Of the Roman city itself, only one street and one corner of the walls had been uncovered. The circus and the amphitheatre had been covered over again. And it was in these Austrian years, too, that Theodore's great mosaic floor came to light in the basilica, as we heard much earlier tonight.

Aquileia stayed Austrian until the First World War. In May nineteen fifteen, Italian soldiers crossed the old border at Cervignano, and after the war Aquileia became part of Italy. And the two little streams, the Judrio and the Ausa, went back to being simply streams, running quietly through the fields to the sea.

Let us go back now to the Val Cellina. For a very long time, the villages of the valley, Andreis, Barcis, Claut, Cimolais and Erto, had no road for carts or carriages coming up from the plain. In the nineteenth century, some ten thousand people lived up there. To reach them, there were only steep mountain paths.

Between the valley and the plain lay a great barrier: the gorge of the Cellina. Over long ages, the river had cut a deep canyon through the limestone, between Barcis and Montereale. It is the largest gorge in the region, and one of the most striking in all of Italy. Its walls are polished and hollowed out by the water, and in its bed there are round hollows worn into the rock, called marmitte. The water is crystal clear.

In the end, the road came because of electricity. Around the turn of the twentieth century, engineers wanted to use the strength of the Cellina. They built a dam inside the gorge, which is now called the old dam, and a canal about seven kilometres long, cut along the side of the ravine, to carry the water down to a power station at Malnisio. The tunnelling began in the summer of nineteen hundred. More than two thousand people, it is said, worked there for five years: miners and stone-cutters, bricklayers and carpenters, and women who carried loads as porters.

The power station at Malnisio was finished in nineteen-oh-five. It was one of the largest in Italy at the time, and the first to bring electricity to Venice. It sent power to Treviso and to Udine as well. A guidebook of nineteen thirteen noted, near Pordenone, "the high-tension line of the Venetian electric works at the falls of the Cellina."

To build all this, a works road had been made into the gorge. The power company would not pay to carry it further, up to Barcis. So the engineer who had designed the waterworks, Aristide Zenari, took the work on, and the towns and villages paid for it. In September nineteen-oh-one, Barcis, Montereale, Pordenone and Aviano joined together to build the road, and the plans were drawn up two years later.

In November nineteen-oh-six, Zenari himself made the first journey by horse-drawn carriage, from Montereale up to Barcis. Imagine the sound of the hooves echoing off the rock walls, and the wheels turning slowly, high above the clear water.

The road ran for about ten kilometres, from Montereale Valcellina to Molassa, near Barcis. For long stretches it ran above the canal. In some places it passed through tunnels. In others, it was a narrow ledge cut into the sheer rock, high above the bottom of the gorge. It passed caves, and one of them was called the Bus de la Volpe, the fox's hole. Near Barcis, it crossed the little Molassa stream.

The road ended the long isolation of the valley. But it also made it easier to leave, and many people went away to work. Around nineteen fifty, with the building of the dam at Barcis, one stretch of the road was moved higher up.

For more than eighty years, the traffic wound its way along the edge of the gorge. Then, in nineteen ninety-two, the old road was closed, and replaced by modern tunnels, the longest of them nearly four kilometres long.

Today the gorge is quiet again. Since the late nineteen-nineties it has been a nature reserve, cared for by the park of the Friulian Dolomites, with a visitor centre at Ponte Antoi. Shy animals have grown in number since people stopped working there, and unusual plants grow in its many sheltered corners. The last stretch of the old road near Barcis can be walked in the warmer months, and a rope bridge, about fifty-five metres long, crosses the canyon. And the power station at Malnisio, which worked until nineteen eighty-eight, is now a museum.

After the First World War, Italy had many soldiers who had fallen and had never been found or named. In nineteen twenty, Colonel Giulio Douhet proposed that one unknown soldier should be honoured, in the name of all of them. The next year, a law decided that he would be buried in Rome on the fourth of November, nineteen twenty-one, the anniversary of the victory.

A commission chose eleven soldiers whose names were unknown, one from each part of the long front. They came from places with names like Rovereto and Pasubio, Ortigara and Grappa, Cortina and Rombon, San Marco and Ermada. None of them carried anything that could tell who he had been. And no one was to know from which place each one had come.

The eleven coffins, all exactly alike, were brought to Aquileia. They were placed in the old basilica, the church of the patriarchs, where so much of the long story of Friuli had already passed.

On the morning of the twenty-eighth of October, nineteen twenty-one, at eleven o'clock, old soldiers who had been wounded gathered in the basilica, with mothers and widows. One mother was to choose a single coffin, on behalf of all the mothers.

Her name was Maria Bergamas, and she came from Gradisca, on the Isonzo. Her son Antonio had been born an Austrian subject, but he had crossed over to fight for Italy, under another name. He had fallen in June nineteen sixteen, in the mountains, and he was never found.

In the quiet of the basilica, Maria Bergamas stopped before one of the coffins. It was the tenth. It is said that she knelt before it. Her daughter later told that she had chosen it so that the soldier who went to Rome would be truly unknown. Bishop Celso Costantini, who led the service, wrote about that morning in his diary.

The chosen coffin was laid in a case of oak, decorated with wrought iron, with a helmet and a rifle on the lid, and it was covered with the flag. The next morning, at eight o'clock, it left Aquileia on a special railway wagon. The wagon bore the years of the war, from nineteen fifteen to nineteen eighteen, written in Roman numerals.

The train went slowly across Italy, and it stopped at every station. It rested for the night at Venice, at Bologna, and at Arezzo. At the Piave, people threw flowers into the river. All along the line, crowds knelt as it went by.

In Rome, the coffin rested for a while in the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli. And on the fourth of November, nineteen twenty-one, the unknown soldier was buried at the great monument called the Altar of the Fatherland, the Vittoriano.

On that same day, the other ten were laid to rest at Aquileia, in the cemetery behind the apse of the basilica. It is called the Cemetery of the Heroes. Some of the first Italian soldiers who fell on the Carso lie there too.

Maria Bergamas lived on for many years. She died in Trieste in December nineteen fifty-three. The following November, she was brought to Aquileia, and laid to rest in the cemetery behind the basilica, near the ten unknown soldiers.

Today they lie there together, in the quiet behind the old church. Around them are the fields of Aquileia, and under those fields, the Roman city sleeps. The seasons come and go, summer and winter, over the plain and the lagoon. And the old bell tower keeps watch over them all.

Just below Barcis, at a place called Ponte Antoi, the Cellina enters its gorge, between high, vertical walls of rock. And here, in the early nineteen-fifties, a dam was built across the river.

It is an arch of concrete, curved in two directions, designed by the engineer Carlo Semenza. It was built by a great electricity company, the Adriatic Electricity Company, and it was finished in nineteen fifty-four. It stands about fifty metres high.

There had been an earlier plan, for a much higher dam and a much bigger lake. That lake would have drowned the village of Barcis, and its houses would have had to be built again, higher up the slopes. In the end, the dam was built lower, and the village stayed where it was, on its terraces above the water.

Behind the new wall, the water of the Cellina gathered, and a lake was born. It covers about a square kilometre, at about four hundred metres above the sea. Its water turns the machines of a power station hidden in a cavern near the old dam in the gorge, and it also waters the fields of the plain and feeds its aqueducts.

Officially, the lake has another name. It is the Lago Aprilis, named after Napoleone Aprilis, who led the consortium that looks after the waters of the Cellina and the Meduna. But most people simply call it the Lake of Barcis.

Its colour is the first thing that people notice. It is an emerald green, somewhere between green and pale blue, and it changes all through the day, with the light. On a still morning, the sky lies quietly on the water. When clouds come down over Monte Lupo and Monte Longa, the lake turns darker, and softer.

The dam and the lake, it is said, helped the village to recover after the war, and today Barcis lives largely from its visitors. A path runs all the way round the lake, under fir trees, past little picnic places, and over a footbridge at a spot called Fontane. The whole walk is about five and a half kilometres, and it takes two or three hours, at an easy pace, from April to November. Visitors can even walk across the top of the dam, with the lake on one side, and the deep gorge on the other.

In summer, the lake comes alive. There are little sailing boats, and windsurfers, and kayaks. People fish from the shore, and swim, and lie in the sun. A little tourist train runs along the water's edge. And every June since nineteen eighty-five, racing boats have come to the lake for an Italian championship, and the valley echoes with their engines.

But most of the time, Barcis is quiet. Palazzo Centi, with its double loggia of rough local stone, looks out over the water, as it has looked out over the valley for some four hundred years. Below it, the lake lies where the river once ran, along the bottom of the basin.

If you were sitting on a bench by the shore on a summer evening, you would see the light leaving the mountains, one slope at a time. The water would turn from green to silver, and then to grey. Above it, the arches of Palazzo Centi would catch the last of the sun. And the lights of the village would come on, one by one, on the terraces above the lake.

We have walked through Venzone before, inside its double walls and into its cathedral of Saint Andrew. A guidebook of nineteen eleven called it simply "a quaint little town." In nineteen sixty-five it was declared a national monument, the only walled town of the fourteenth century in the region. By nineteen seventy-six, about seven hundred people lived inside its walls.

On the evening of the sixth of May, nineteen seventy-six, just after nine o'clock, the earth shook in the middle valley of the Tagliamento. More than a hundred towns and villages were damaged, and Gemona, Venzone and Osoppo were among those hit the hardest. Many lives were lost across Friuli, and many homes.

In Venzone, part of the cathedral fell. On the thirteenth of May, a committee carried the statues, the paintings and the furnishings of the cathedral to safety. Through the summer, experts from Italy and from Austria photographed and measured the damaged church and the town, very carefully. Later, those pictures would guide the rebuilding.

That summer, many families lived in tents. Then, on the fifteenth of September, there came strong new shocks. The cathedral, and much of the already damaged town, fell almost completely. In the autumn, many people moved for a while to hotels on the Adriatic coast, while wooden houses were built for them over the winter. In Friulian tradition, the earthquake is a monster that lives under the mountains, and it has a name: the Orcolat.

Now begins the gentler part of the story. Instead of carting the ruins away, workers and volunteers sorted them. The squared stones of the cathedral were mostly only chipped, not broken. One by one, they were picked out of the rubble, recorded, and stored.

The people of Venzone wanted their town back, as it had been. In the summer of nineteen seventy-seven, most of the inhabitants signed a petition, asking for a rebuilding faithful to the old town. And so it was decided to rebuild by anastylosis. It is a long word for something simple: putting the original stones back in their original places.

From nineteen eighty-two, more than nine thousand stones were numbered and catalogued. Each one was given a number or a sign, and they were laid out in great stone yards, like the pieces of an enormous puzzle. The old photographs helped to find the place of each stone. Work on the cathedral itself began in nineteen eighty-eight.

Local stonemasons did the work, and a new generation of craftsmen learned the trade. Steel was hidden inside the walls, to help them stand against future earthquakes. Where a stone was lost, a new one, of the same size and the same kind of stone, took its place. In the end, more than nine stones in every ten went back where they had been. And the walls that had survived, bent but standing, were kept as they were, so that the scars can still be seen.

During the work, the builders found something hidden on the floor of the older church that had stood there before. It was a drawing of one end of the cathedral, the front of its north transept, almost fourteen metres wide, scratched into the stone by masons of the fourteenth century. For six hundred years, it had waited there, under their feet.

The town hall was rebuilt by nineteen eighty-four, and by the end of the nineteen-eighties the old town stood again. In August nineteen ninety-five, the cathedral opened its doors once more. Venzone was rebuilt where it was and as it was, with its scars left visible. Only one ruin was left on purpose: the front of the old church of Saint John the Baptist, kept as a memorial.

Today, in a palace of the town, a museum called Tiere Motus tells the story of those years. Its name joins a Friulian word, tiere, the earth, and a Latin word, motus, movement. And outside, in the streets, the old stones sit quietly in their places again, warm in the afternoon sun.

Evening is falling now across Friuli. The long day is over, and the light is fading, slowly, on the mountains and on the plain.

At Aquileia, the lagoon turns silver, and then grey. The tall bell tower stands against the sky, as it has for almost a thousand years. Under the fields around it, most of the Roman city still lies sleeping, never dug up. In nineteen ninety-eight, the old city and its basilica were added to the World Heritage List of UNESCO. And behind the apse, the ten unknown soldiers rest, with Maria Bergamas near them.

Far to the north, at the gate in the mountains, the walls of Venzone are growing dark. The cathedral of Saint Andrew stands quietly inside the walls, its old stones back in their places, each one numbered once, and remembered. Beside the town, the Tagliamento runs on through its wide bed of stones, as it always has.

At Polcenigo, the Gorgazzo still flows through the village, cold and clear, past the old houses of stone and wood. Its deep pool at the foot of the rock is losing its blue, and turning dark. A little way off, at the Santissima, the Livenza rises quietly from many small springs at once, and within a few dozen metres it is already a river.

And at Barcis, high in the Val Cellina, the emerald lake holds the last light of the day. The village and Palazzo Centi are mirrored in the still water. In the gorge below the dam, the old road still clings to the rock, quiet now in the dark.

All across Friuli, the lights are coming on. In farmhouses on the plain, in the windows of mountain villages, in small squares where a bell is ringing the end of the day. The roads grow empty. The rivers go on running, down from the mountains, toward the sea.

Tonight we have travelled a long way, from a village of wooden houses in a marsh, some six thousand years ago, to a cathedral rebuilt stone by stone. We have met Roman settlers and patriarchs, merchants and stonemasons, women carrying wooden spoons down from the mountains, and a mother in an old basilica.

There is nothing you need to remember. The stories will keep, like stones in an old wall, or like water resting deep under the mountains, waiting to rise.

So let your breathing slow down, and let your eyes close. The lagoon is quiet. The mountains are dark. And somewhere, at the foot of a rock wall, a spring is rising, cold and clear, under the stars.

Thank you for spending this long evening with me. Sleep well, and goodnight.